Israel’s Central Election Committee finished counting 95% of the votes. This evening it will start examining the other 5%, which includes the votes of soldiers, diplomats and prisoners, and votes contested for one reason or another.

It took a historic coalition of parties from the left and the right with the unprecedented addition of an Arab party to dislodge former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from office in June 2021. Now, Netanyahu has made a comeback and will soon be returning to the Prime Minister’s Office as the winner of the latest election.

Supporters of the Bennett-Lapid government woke up on Nov. 2 to a radically different world than the one that they were accustomed to. Not only was the government they controlled for the past year and a half taken from them by a right-wing, ultra-Orthodox coalition, but the way things look now, the old, established Meretz Party so identified with the Israeli left failed to pass the electoral threshold. Without a last-minute miracle, the party that fought the occupation for decades will now vanish from the political map.

Fingers at the center-left camp are pointed today at Lapid, blaming him for the failure of the entire camp. He failed to unite the party around him and bring about the merger of the Meretz and Labor parties, as Netanyahu did with Religious Zionism and the extremist Jewish Power. Had he done that, Meretz would have perhaps been spared its ignominious defeat, and the liberal-left bloc would have minimized the damage from its defeat.